What is a good scripting language for handling large amounts of numbers / data?

Question

Hello all,
I am an intermediate programmer and I was wondering what scripting language is fairly simple to use, but is very powerful in handling large amounts of data, such as numbers and text. I've heard Perl is good for this task, but I have heard it is fairly hard to learn. Any suggestions? Thanks.

Answer 1

Go for Python. It's good enough, and it's a scripting language. You could also use PowerShell, Ruby or Lua - but Python is probably good enough.

Answer 2

Perl is excellent for this kind of work. The genetics field and wall street finance people love it for the flexibility to manage large data sets.





It's worth the investment of time to learn.



You should look into CPAN.org to see if the kind of data manipulation tools you need already exist.



In a previous position i had multi tens of megabytes data sets to process with the requirements and reporting changing rapidly. If not for perl I would not have been able to do the work. We would run through the data 100 times a day with no problem. It was in the Pentium 4/ 1.5 GHz / 512 meg/ XP days.

Answer 3

Perl is easy to use for things such as text manipulation and similar string operations and even used for DNA things, don't know how much, but it is not fast. Python is probably faster.





Thanks!

Answer 4

Python is the best one for scientific computing I think, it has huge support for complicated scientific calculations built into its standard library. It is also awesome at parsing and sorting through data.



Hope this helps!

Answer 5

Yea; go with Python. It's simple and very good with numerical values. It's also very easy to work with.